Replacing Everest in our labs is AIDA64. This new testing suite is from the core development team from Lavalys and continues that tradition. The guys have thrown in better support for multithreaded CPUs as well as full 64 bit support. We use this to test memory and HDDs for now, but may find ourselves opening this up to other areas of the motherboard.

Comparing the SATA III performance between our two ASRock boards, we can see that there's not much between them. We can see the boost in performance we get over the SATA II drive, though.

HD Tune Pro gives us accurate read, write and access time results and for the last couple of years has been gaining popularity amongst reviewers. It is now considered a must have application for storage device testing.

HD Tune Pro helps paint the same picture as we saw just above with some excellent performance coming out of our new Corsair Force GT SATA III drive over our older Kingston SATA II drives.